Reply to: The Generic API

[doodab]

You mean an Entity-Attribute-Value database.

Good theory, awful practise.

Yeah, kind of, except it wasn't "sparse" data.

To be fair to said database vendor they advised in the manuals that each item (an in-flight proccess in a workflow system) have a small number of attributes corresponding to process state and keys in a properly designed relational schema.

Unfortunately the people who implemented the system at clientco didn't read the manual and every data item ended up as an atrribute of the associated process.

You can guess how the performance scaled with a few million processes and subprocesses (which would duplicate the data items they required) each having several hundred associated pieces of data.

[TheFaQQer]

Intelligent Finance used that when I was there. They ended up putting 15 millions lines of code round it.

Yet another Oracle Consulting project of legends - kerching!

[AtW]

Intelligent Finance used that when I was there.

[TheFaQQer]

******* MAKE ME STOP!!!

Bring on the new moderator(s)!!

[minestrone]

You mean an Entity-Attribute-Value database.

Good theory, awful practise.

Intelligent Finance used that when I was there. They ended up putting 15 millions lines of code round it.

[Mich the Tester]

Actually, he was. Were you there?

If it was in Wognum, NL, yes. What a f**king pile of tulipe.

Metadata and operational data all crammed in the same tables, nobody that knew the data model (basically there wasn't one), and some twunt who said 'we don't use referential integrity in oracle because it makes the performance worse'. FFS, the whole point of a RDBMS is referential integrity, but would Bob call Oracle and check his assertions with them? Of course not.

I didn't even get paid for half that contract because clientco AND agent went bust. The only good thing is that Bob didn't get paid either.

[AtW]

We don't pick you up on your Russian typo's so lay off our English ones.

******* MAKE ME STOP!!!

[DimPrawn]

Was he from infosys?

Actually, he was. Were you there?

[DiscoStu]

Practice

Practise

Practise - Verb

Practice - Noun

HTH

[Mich the Tester]

I worked with a guy designing a corporate database.

He had a plan that every table would have a many-to-many join table with every other, so the schema looked like a rats nest. He said this "future proofed" the database for any possible business changes.

Smart cookie.

Was he from infosys?

[DimPrawn]

Practice

We don't pick you up on your Russian typo's so lay off our English ones.

[AtW]

Good theory, awful practise.

Practice

[TheFaQQer]

I once worked with a piece of software that had two tables.

items (item_id, item_name)

attributes(attribute_id, item_id, attribute_name, attribute_value)

The software in question was an offering from a well known database vendor.

You mean an Entity-Attribute-Value database.

Good theory, awful practise.

[doodab]

I once worked with a piece of software that had two tables.

items (item_id, item_name)

attributes(attribute_id, item_id, attribute_name, attribute_value)

The software in question was an offering from a well known database vendor.

[DimPrawn]

I worked with a guy designing a corporate database.

He had a plan that every table would have a many-to-many join table with every other, so the schema looked like a rats nest. He said this "future proofed" the database for any possible business changes.

Smart cookie.